Depression is a bore, a sulky, overweight, useless bore. Especially when it drags on week after week. I miss writing with a passion that almost consumes me, but still feel unable to continue with my latest book. The dreariness of my mind and the exhaustion of my body prevent me from concentrating on the one thing that makes my life exuberant.

It is a terrible sensation opening the Word document, already covered in dust, and staring at those first paragraphs feeling nothing move or stir. Nada. Those words, those characters, those scenes now seem blurry patches in the mist, cut off from the wild ideas I once cocked up in my sparkling imagination. It hurts, it physically hurts, like a limb recently cut off with the agonising pain following me throughout the day and night.

All I can do is bury myself in book after book by authors who had the courage and the incentive to continue writing. I absorb thousands of published words with a passion I currently can’t find in my own work, lapping up the gorgeous, intricate patterns of words with a wan smile of remembrance. I smile along with the variety of authors, sensing what they must have sensed when they wrote these words, some recently and some many years ago. The books are so vibrant, vital to my sense of self, a reminder of what I once loved so much. It feeds the hope that one day soon I, too, may return to the craft that binds us, on the day I start living again. For writing is the essence of me and without it I’m as good as dead. I continue to breathe without much pleasure, craving for the one thing that truly fulfils me.